Some electronic devices (e.g. a laptop personal computer (PC)) have multiple input devices available to the user. The most common are keyboard and pointing devices (e.g. a mouse and/or a touch pad). Recently, the pointing device landscape has become more complex. In certain systems there are now multiple input pads responsive to touch, e.g. one for finger touch (e.g. a touch pad) and one for stylus touch (e.g. digitized/pen). Users encountering electronic devices with multiple inputs may inadvertently press or touch some input devices (e.g. the touch pad or the touch pad buttons while trying to use the stylus). The result is inadvertent or errant input (e.g. cursor activity appearing on the screen that does not match the user's expectations or intentions) that sometimes causes errors.
Conventional solutions to the above-described problem essentially fall into two categories. The first involves manually turning off one of the input devices (e.g. pressing Fn.+F8 keys). This is often an impractical solution for the user, as many times the user wishes to quickly switch back and forth between the input devices to complete a task. The second solution involves using a “palmcheck” filter that filters out potentially inadvertent contacts based on the size of the contact. The palmcheck filter ignores (i.e. filters out) inputs that are deemed too large to be caused by finger contact (e.g. a palm contact has a much larger area than a finger tip contact on a touch pad). While the palmcheck filter exists in some touchpad technologies, the filter is not sensitive enough to remove all of the inadvertent inputs. The filtering also does not filter for button clicks associated with an input device (e.g. the buttons associated with a touch pad).
Thus, a need has arisen to address the shortcomings of the conventional solutions for preventing inadvertent inputs encountered by users of multi-input electronic devices.